Hello I am hoping to use a newer arduino Board the arduino mkr zero instead of a standard Arduino am wondering if anyone has done this before or not as it is a new board

Disclaimer, I'm no expert, just a DIYino fanboy and four time installer. Take my advice with a grain of salt, or wait until JBKuma turns up

Trying out FX-saber OS with newer arduino boards has been on my to do list for a while. That said, I suspect the MKR zero wouldn't be worth a try, at least, not as an out of the box direct replacement for a Nano.

Just looking at the tech specs, Under EEPROM, they list NO, which doesn't look too good, as FX-Sos needs eeprom for accelerometer and RGB data storage. If you could get past that, while the onboard SD card reader has potential, I think you'd have to re-write a lot of the code to work without the DF player libraries.

I mean, I'd give it a pass, given my limited coding experience. If you've got decent C++ skills and want a challenge, give it a go. I wouldn't expect it to work out of the box, though.

That is correct, it will not directly port over. Any AVR board with sufficient memory SHOULD work. I know it works with 1284 since I've built sabers with this (and a prototype MegaBrains DIYino type board), and the 2560 chip should work as well. These chips provide more memory and peripherals, but have the same 8bit AVR for compatibility.

I've recently picked up some LGT8F328P clone boards and the EEPROM seems like it may be incompatible with our stock libraries as well as not compiling with Jakesoft's USaber. I'm not sure how much work I'll put into sorting it out since ideally I'd be spending my time on a bigger technology leap. These have a DAC and can be clocked at 32MHz, but are otherwise basically meant as atmega328 replacements with the same memory sizes and 8bit.

We have been working intermittently on producing a next level.

One of the gotchas with newer chips is that they have so much functionality that development boards typically have different pin availability. The atmega328p is simple and ubiquitous which makes it a very nice platform for homebrew style builds.

Library support is also an issue. The samd21 just never really caught on, so there isn't a lot of support for it.

To that end I've been looking at the ESP32 as a nice choice. It is cheap, ubiquitous, and offers a number of nice features for next level development including Bluetooth and WiFi. There is a big development community and a lot of interesting boards that can be used for related props.

Andras has also begun developing an nRF52 based board, which is an ARM Cortex based board that should have some cross compatibility with other ARM Cortex chips like the popular STM32 which is in the Teensy boards.